[Fixed top-posting.] On Mon, 01 Mar 2021 10:23:51 +0000 David Goodenough <david.goodeno...@btconnect.com> wrote:
> On Monday, 1 March 2021 09:29:57 GMT Andrei POPESCU wrote: > > On Du, 28 feb 21, 12:03:31, Celejar wrote: > > > Snark aside, what's wrong with something like this: > > > > > > "Many wireless network cards (and even some wired ones) require > > > non-free firmware to function properly. This firmware is not included > > > in the standard installation images, due to Debian's free software > > > ideals. If the network hardware your installation will rely upon > > > requires such firmware, you may consider using the alternate non-free > > > installation images available here." > > > > For those who didn't visit the Debian website recently, following the > > discussion on debian-devel this is now two clicks away from the home > > page (-> More... -> Download: More variants of Debian images): > > > > https://www.debian.org/distrib/ > > > > If any of the hardware in your system requires non-free firmware to > > be loaded with the device driver, you can use one of the tarballs of > > common firmware packages or download an unofficial image including > > these non-free firmwares. > > > > Instructions how to use the tarballs and general information about > > loading firmware during an installation can be found in the > > Installation Guide. > > > > unofficial installation images for "stable" with firmware included > How is a naive user meant to know whether his hardware required non-free > firmware? > The only route that seems to be given by this wording is that they install > (or try to install) > the system using the official image, and then have to work out for themselves > what does > not work, and from that which unofficial image to use. > > Could the installer not help here by identifying hardware it can not support > but which an > unofficial image does support and point the user in the right > direction? Yes the knowledge of which hardware exists changes over time, and > after the > installer is built, but if the unofficial images had machine readable > descriptors on the > debian web site of what they support (which would be updated each time a new > image > was added) then the installer could consult this and thus be able to give the > best available > advice. It's even worse than that - as I reported here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=895258 in at least some cases, if NIC firmware is missing, the installer will simply display the rather unhelpful message: "Network configuration failure," with no hint of what the problem might actually be. A savvy user will know to look in the logs, where the problem is made quite clear, but the installer itself could certainly do with some improvement. Celejar
